Racket v8.5

Racket version 8.5 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org.

As of this release:

• Racket’s new -y flag automatically keeps compiled files up to date, reducing subsequent load times.

• Error-message realms allow Racket-hosted languages to adapt and rewrite error messages to make sense in a particular context.

• Nonprivileged users can control package installation scope using an “other-version” directory in the addon-dir.

• Racket CS runs on platforms where native-code generation is not currently supported (e.g., s390x or ppc64). See “README.txt” in the source distribution for more information on the —enable-pb flag to configure.

• DrRacket’s new ‘Reopen Closed Tab’ file menu item will open previously closed tabs.

• Typed Racket has support for the xml library; use typed/xml.

• Rackunit reports source locations for failed test cases in the Typed Racket language.

• Plot has violin plots and improved box-and-whisker plots.

• Boxes are supported alongside lists, vectors etc. in place-channel messages.

• Those who manually configure Racket CS to use Zlib compression for compiled code should be aware of CVE–2018–25032; the next release and the current snapshot builds use a newer, safer version of zlib.

• The release includes many other repairs and changes!

The following people contributed to this release:

Alex Harsányi, Alexander Shopov, Alexis King, Andrew Mauer-Oats, Ben Greenman, Benedek Szilvasy, Bert De Ketelaere, Bogdan Popa, Cameron Moy, Chung-chieh Shan, Fred Fu, Gustavo Massaccesi, J. Ryan Stinnett, Jamie Taylor, Joel Dueck, John Clements, Joseph Griego, Khadija Sidhpuri, Laurent Orseau, Maciej Barć, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber, Noah Ma, Philip McGrath, Robby Findler, Ryan Culpepper, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stephen De Gabrielle, Tim Jervis, and Trevor Paley

Link to package regressions issue for the 8.5 release: https://github.com/racket/racket/issues/4202